My Experiments with Animation

I got interested in animation (using photographs), after seeing the fantastic animation gallery of Mr Ernst Shutz ( You can see it at http://www.pbase.com/es839145/root.) He has hundreds of pictures and animations and more than 2 million people have already visited his gallery!
However, I wanted to try something slightly different and chose blooming of flowers. My first attempt can be seen in my blog alongside. The problem with shooting such pictures is that it takes a long time for the flower to fully blossom, there are movements of the stems and the flowers during the process which spoil the effect, not to speak of the changing light conditions. Not long after my first pic, I had the rare chance to shoot another challenging picture, that of the the flowering of rain lily in our backyard. The whole process took almost 5 hours and there were light showers in between, forcing me to remove the camera and repositioning it (more or less) at the same location, which was the toughest part. The result, though nothing much to write home about, can be seen above. I sent it to Mr Shutz telling him how he had inspired me, and despite the large number of mails which he must be receiving, he was kind enough to reply as follows:
Hi,
thank you so much for sharing your result of an amimated wild flower. You are really good on that and you are on the good path to do even better. I still have to do a similar thing - I planned to do an animated flower but I found no suitable day with a bit of a steady light for several hours and absence of wind. I will keep in touch and also share my animations.
Greetings
Ernst Schütz - Switzerland

The Sky

It's always a pleasure to watch the night sky with its zillions of celestial bodies. But, with today's mindless 'development', it is impossible to watch a clear sky in cities, what with skyscrapers, pollution and the ambient light. Things are not so bad in the villages yet. Iam still fortunate to be able to see a reasonably clear sky from my present residence at Bangalore especially when there is a power cut which is not infrequent.

One of the most interesting events in sky-watching is when there is an occasional confluence of the celestial objects such as the moon and planets and of course, the chance sight of a meteor. Given alongside are photographs of two such events, one, the rendezvous of Venus with moon and the other, the confluence of moon, Venus and Jupiter. In the first case, which occurred in February, 2004, Venus appeared to be very close to moon though in reality it is 307 times farther than moon from earth. Venus was so brilliant because it was closer to the Sun than Earth so it got lit more brightly. It was looking like a tear drop from moon. Venus is sometimes called our sister planet because it is similar in size to Earth.

The Moon-Venus-Jupiter confluence occurred on 1st December 2008 and I could just get one shot before the clouds intervened. It was as if the crescent moon was winking and smiling! This phenomenon occurs once in four years.

The Da Vinci Code and St.Sulpice Church

Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’ is one of my favourite books. I was enamoured by the manner in which Dan Brown juxtaposed facts and fiction, making the readers almost believe that this is how it happened. I had visited the Louvre Museum some time back, but after reading the book, I wanted to revisit it as the starting point of the Da Vinci Code trail. The opportunity arose during a transit through Paris in 2005, but it happened to be a holiday for the museum on account of May Day. This left me with the option of visiting another scene of action in the book, namely St.Sulpice Church. And was it worth the trouble!

The Louvre and the Glass Pyramid

The present church of Saint Sulpice was constructed in the 17th century on the site of an earlier building (the ancient temple to the Egyptian goddess Isis, according to Dan Brown), the remains of which are visible in the crypt of the church. A number of additions and modifications were done during the 17th and 18th centuries. The church had a turbulent history and ceased to be a place of worship during the French Revolution. Many of its treasures were pillaged . It was again restored during the first half of 19th century.

The Nave of the Church

As mentioned in the 'Code', the astronomical gnomon is a major attraction of the church.

The gnomon is an astronomical instrument designed to follow the variations in the height of the sun at noon. It works by means of a 'meridian' line traced on the floor of the transept by a brass insert in the stone pavement. It is carefully laid from south to north and continues on a white marble obelisk. In the book, the meridian is referred to as the 'Rose Line' and ostensibly represented the time line before 'Greenwich Meridian' was accepted as the new time line.

The ornate vault, the beautiful choir and the elegant stained glass windows all add to the magnificence of the church.

To see a video of St.Sulpice Church, please click on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI6B-T7C9g4&feature=channel_page

The Organ Case

The Quiet Creek

The human mind is quite like the sea with its high and low tides. And in the morning, an all pervading calm prevails only to be broken again by disturbances like a boat knifing through this quietness, making ripples and leaving behind turbulence in its wake.
These pictures were taken when I was waiting on a ferry to be taken across the creek at Baratang, Middle Andamans.
The water was as still as one can imagine and the mangroves provided a contrasting backdrop. The early morning sun falling lazily on the veil of fog completed the picture. As I was breathing in this beautiful scene, the thud-thud of a distant motor boat was heard and the ensuing sight was as magical as the previous one.

It was like the Schliren Pictures that we had in the aerodynamics lab where flow visualisation around aerofoils is recorded in a wind tunnel.
You can watch videos of Baratang at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUQTmEw5o3o

Roses

This is another of my favourite pictures. They say 'a Rose by any other name is a rose is a rose is a ....', but I don't think it would sound as beautiful. This particular flower had such delicate colours, it was looking a bit ethereal. For those who love flowers, I have a big collection of pitures in my orkut under the name venugopalan cheriyaveettil.

There is a beautiful site on Indian Flowers at http://www.flowersofindia.net/catalog/alphabet.html which any Indian can be proud of for its quality and comprehensiveness. It is the result of great effort by Dr.Tabish and Thingnam Girija. Another site dealing with flowers is flowers.org wherein some of my pictures are published. See http://flowerspicture.org/venugopalan.html

Solitude

You will find this picture in many of my uploads. It was a chance pic taken at Elephant Beach, Havelock Island, Andamans which we had visited in December, 2006. We hired a boat to the Elephant Beach which is an ideal place for snorkeling. The weather was not too good with an overcast sky and occasional rains. There were a few other tourists rollicking in the water. The bare tree and the lonely boy sitting on the trunk caught my eye and I clicked it without much ado because we were in a hurry to finish the snorkeling and go back as the weather was turning from bad to worse. To conserve the battery, I had shot the picture without switching on the LCD monitor and didn't know how it looked like until it was downloaded onto the PC. It was not bad and a lot of people like it. So, here it is!

For a high resolution image, please click on the picture.